Planes of Composition: Dance, Theory, and the Global (review)

Planes of Composition: Dance, Theory, and the Global, an expansion of TDR's Dance Composes Philosophy Composes Dance series on new choreography (vol. 50, no. 4; vol. 51, no. 2), is precipitated by questions of mobilization that arise when the circulation of bodies and capital in the contemporary global marketplace is understood through the perspective of critical dance studies and performance theory. Consisting of eighteen essays from a diverse collection of dance scholars and practitioners, choreographers and artists, and philosophers and theorists, the volume weaves together dynamic perspectives from contemporary philosophy and dance. Editors André Lepecki and Jenn Joy emphasize in their preface, however, that this anthology is neither "yet another call for interdisciplinarity" (ix) nor a one-to-one mapping of one field onto another, but rather an endeavor to acknowledge the heterogeneity that arises from kinetic and philosophical movement. Their aim is to address the sometimes chaotic, sometimes turbulent yet always stimulating conversation between contemporary choreography and critical dance studies, considered in relation to current sociopolitical theory. Rather than reconcile contradictions, smooth out irregularities, or fill in apparent logical gaps of reasoning within this dialogue, the editors of this book offer us a body of essays that generate a Deleuzean folding, unfolding, and refolding of dance on varied planes of composition.

The tone of the book is set in Peter Sloterdijk's opening essay—a philosophical discussion of modernization and progress that takes as its point of departure the accelerating global movements of bodies and capital in the postmodern period. From here, the essays that follow in "Part I: The Stop and Go of Postmodernity" contemplate various choreographies that respond to cultural and political imperatives in the contemporary world. SanSan Kwan delivers an "auto-ethnographic choreography" of her experience in postcolonial Hong Kong as it relates to Helen Lai's poignant Revolutionary Pekinese Opera in order to illustrate the social, political, and cultural struggles of Hong Kong's citizenry. Like Kwan in Hong Kong, Royona Mitra considers the "tensions and vibrations" (44) that arise from post-colonialism in India, and how the resulting confusions are embodied in contemporary dance. She positions dance in a global, postmodern space that highlights social momentum and the need to accept cultural inconsistencies in order to further political progress.

A common theme throughout the remainder of the book is liminality, such as exists in the "third space" between boundaries or in a perceived absence (a hole or chasm). These essays are concerned with how space is created, how this space can be filled, and how space can be recreated and reconceptualized through iterative refolding. Negotiations between absence and presence generate a creative potentiality in shadows of space, most powerfully demonstrated in this book by the headless and limbless crouching figures of Bill Durgin's Rue Vieille du Temple, pictured in Jenn Joy's "Anatomies of Spasm." In "Part II: Assembling Relations," the reader is ushered through a gallery that offers glimmers of bodies and nonbodies, or perhaps merely shadows of bodies, such as the "paradoxical body" described by philosopher José Gil, the elastic almost-body of tango dancer Erin Manning, and the stuttering body of Paula Caspão that represents the inarticulacy of politics and art through fractal, nonlinear movement. Noémie Solomon, on the other hand, places choreography on a concrete plane—a table in Mathilde Monnier and Jean-Luc Nancy's Allitérations—in order to connect scattered gestural elements of the dance to a larger exterior meaning.

The material covered in this book can be characterized by a quality of unrest—sometimes eerily abstract and, at other times, violently chaotic—an uncertainty that is by no means accidental. André Lepecki's essay "Drawing with Feet, Walking on Hands: Robin Rhode's Frequency" traces dancer Jean-Baptiste André's meandering choreographic journey: walking in disintegrating white chalk and black charcoal shoes, André inverts his body to walk on his hands, which turns a graffiti of racial tensions in South Africa upside down and digs a...